2016 - 2020

ELECTRONIC LIFE FORM GETS BASIC RIGHTS

AS robots become more sophisticated and involve the addition of organic material into their construction there will be calls for their rights to be safeguarded.

2041 - 2045

MOON BASE

A VILLAGE will be firmly established on the Moon, serviced by regular shuttle flights.

2046 - 2050

MARS COLONY

A SMALL colony of scientists and explorers will be entirely self-sufficient, growing food in large greenhouse-style pods.

2051+

BRAIN DOWNLOADS

EVERYTHING in your brain - thoughts, feelings and memories - will be transferred to a computer, ensuring a form of digital immortality if eventually uploaded into a human brain later.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 5:46 PM  |

All traditional family systems, Therborn argues, have comprised three regimes: of patriarchy, marriage and fertility (crudely summarized--who calls the shots in the family, how people hitch up, how many kids result). Between Sex and Power sets out to trace the modern history of each. For Therborn patriarchy is male family power, typically invested in fathers and husbands, not the subordination of or discrimination against women in general--gender inequality being a broader phenomenon. At the beginning of his story, around 1900, patriarchy in this classical sense was a universal pattern, albeit with uneven gradations. In Europe, the French Revolution had failed to challenge it, issuing in the ferocious family clauses of the Napoleonic Code, while subsequent industrial capitalism--in North America as in Europe--relied no less on patriarchal norms as a sheet anchor of moral stability. Confucian and Muslim codes were far more draconian, though the "minute regulations" of the former set some limits to the potential for a "blank cheque" for male power. Arrangements were looser in much of sub-Saharan Africa, Creole America and Southeast Asia. Harshest of all was the Hindu system of North India, in a league of its own for repression. As Therborn notes, this is one of the very few parts of the world where men live longer than women, even today.

By 2000, however, patriarchy had become "the big loser of the twentieth century," as Therborn puts it, yielding far more ground than religion or tyranny.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:55 PM  |

The President, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, articulated this unlikely optimism when she addressed the nation two days after the tsunami. Sri Lanka, she declared, had been "incredibly humbled" by the waves, which had dealth death and destruction to all ethnic groups indiscriminately. Never mind that Sinhalese, who count for nearly seventy-give per cent of the island's twenty million inhabitants, outnumber Tamils by roughly four to one, and that Tamils, in turn, outnumber the largest minority group, Muslims, by three to one. "Nature does not differentiate in the treatment of peoples," the President said, and she urged Sri Lankans to follow nature's example. In fact, many had responded to the disaster by rushing to the aid of the afflicted without regard for their identity. There were stories of Sinhalese soldiers risking -- and losing -- their lives in efforts to rescue Tamil civilians; of Tamil businessmen carting meals to displaced Sinhalese survivors; and of Muslims buying up clothes and medicines to hand out to Hindus and Buddhists. It was only later that Sri Lankans had time to register their surprise at their own unthinking decency, and their relief at this discovery was compounded by a sense that the tsunami had saved the country from an imminent return to war.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 1:06 PM  |

When the white god Viracocha mysteriously appeared in South America, he taught the people he met all the “arts of civilization”: astronomy, geometry, agriculture and architecture. He also taught them how to make wine from honey. When he left them, they slowly returned to their huts and gradually forgot most of what they’d learned. But to this day they still brew an alcoholic beverage called balche, based on the same recipe Viracocha taught their ancestors millennia ago. And who can blame them. I mean, those other arts are great and all, but what are they compared to a well-prepared gourd of honey wine?

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:18 AM  |

# First, there's a protagonist, a hero.
# His or her world is thrown out of order by an inciting incident. (Look at the sabotaged dope deal in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for a good example of this.)
# A gap opens up between the hero and an orderly life.
# The hero tries the normal, conservative action to overcome the gap. It fails. The world pushes back too hard.
# The hero then has to take a risk to overcome the obstacles that are pushing back.
# Then there is a reversal. Something new happens, or the hero learns something she didn't know before, and the world is out of whack again. A second gap has opened up.
# The hero has to take a greater risk to overcome the second gap.
# After overcoming the second gap, there is another reversal, opening a third gap.
# The hero has to take the greatest risk of all to overcome this gap and get to that object of desire, which is usually an orderly life.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 6:55 PM  |

(1) The When-in-Doubt-about-the-Book-Slam-the-Accompanying-Materials Gambit.
(2) The What-Happened-to-the-Fact-Checker? Assertion.
(3) The Philip-Roth-Is-Nathan-Zuckerman Fundamental Error.
(4) The Fact-Checker-with-Too-Much-Time-on-His-Hands Critique.
(5) The Backhanded Compliment or... The Right Review for the Wrong Reasons.
(6) The Boneheaded Comparison.
(7) The Ethnically Correct Review Assignment.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 5:56 PM  |

Where a Scotch-sozzled Big Bruiser once ran onto the fire escape with a roar, rolling up his or her sleeves to challenge the whole U.S. of A. to step outside, now a smallish fellow in a knit cap and woolen sweater sits in the corner with a box of chocolate milk, giggling at his own inadvertent burps. Where Pops built skyscraper-sized mirrors to reflect a metastasizing society, Junior lives in a world we might call Mini-Micro-Narcissus. Son of Big Bruiser, I name you LittleBlue SmurfBoy™--after the fetish of your patron saint, Donnie Darko, the most sensitive and martyred of your kind. I take this moment to examine the markings of your race, as evinced by your most applauded manifestations: novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, filmmaker Wes Anderson, and musician Conor Oberst.

...

I can only pray some hibernating Bruiser--Don DeLillo, say, or Robert Rauschenberg--will spring from his cave, tear LBSB's Saint-Exupéry scarf off his pencil neck, and show him how it's really done: art-making revealed as high-wire act, fire-eating contest, bare-knuckle barroom brawl.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:17 AM  |

The American Civil Liberties Union said witnesses in North Carolina courtrooms should be allowed to swear to tell the truth on scriptures other than the Bible.

The ACLU has filed a lawsuit to permit oaths to be taken on the holy books of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and other non-Christian faiths.

Judges in Guilford County ruled recently that Muslims cannot legally take an oath on the Quran. [emphasis mine]

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:08 AM  |

ZeldaLegends.net is your source for Zelda Continuity and Storyline Theory. ZeldaUniverse.net has more, including a page about Wind Waker.

Still a Zelda novice? Wikipedia is your friend.

Windows users: you can download the original Legend of Zelda for play on your computer. NOTE: This may be questionably legal.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 3:46 PM  |

For instance, if the number says "4", that means there are four filled squares in a row in that column, and the rest are empties.

If the number says "4 5", that means there are four filled squares in a row in that column, some number of empty squares, and then five filled squares in a row (and then empties, in any squares are left).

"2 1 2 1" means the pattern in that row is two filled squares, some number of empties, 1 filled square, some number of empties, 2 filled squares in a row, some number of empties, and then one filled square (and then empties, if any squares are left).

And so on.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 3:20 PM  |

Tuesday morning, Jillian from Disasters calls. Apparently an airman named Loolerton has poisoned a shitload of beavers. I say we don’t kill beavers, we harvest them, because otherwise they nibble through our Pollution Control Devices (P.C.D.s) and polluted water flows out of our Retention Area and into the Eisenhower Memorial Wetland, killing beavers.

“That makes sense,” Jillian says, and hangs up.

The press has a field day. “AIR FORCE KILLS BEAVERS TO SAVE BEAVERS,” says one headline. “MURDERED BEAVERS SPEAK OF AIR FORCE CRUELTY,” says another.

“We may want to PIDS this,” Mr. Rimney says.

I check the files: There’s a circa-1984 tortoise-related PIDS from a base in Oklahoma. There’s a wild-horse-related PIDS from North Dakota. Also useful is a Clinton-era PIDS concerning the inadvertent destruction of a dove breeding ground.

From these I glean an approach: I admit we harvested the beavers. I concede the innocence and creativity of beavers. I explain the harvesting as a regrettable part of an ongoing effort to prevent Pollution Events from impacting the Ottowattamie. Finally I pledge we’ll find a way to preserve our P.C.D.s without, in the future, harming beavers. We are, I say, considering transplanting the beaver population to an innovative Beaver Habitat, to be installed upstream of the Retention Area.

“Let me tell you a like parable,” Giff says. “This one girl in our church? Had this like perma-smile? Due to something? And her husband, who was non-church, was always having to explain that she wasn’t really super-happy, it was just her malady. It was like the happier she looked, the madder he got. Then he came to our church, guess what happened?”

“She was miraculously cured and he was miraculously suddenly not angry,” says Rimney. “God reached down and fixed them both, while all over the world people who didn’t come to your church remained in misery, weeping.”

“Well, no,” says Giff.

“And that’s not technically a parable,” says Verblin.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:07 AM  |

Maybe I do resent the success of She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Panned and covet her readership, but am just too self-unaware to know it. But that doesn't really explain why I enjoyed some parts of the book and not others. Rowling wasn't any richer when writing the pages where characters are forever exhorting one another with banalities like "Come on" and "Let's go" than she was on Page 96, when somebody says, "[P]eople find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right," which I quite liked.

...

The only real relativism I'm defenseless against came from one of my favorite relatives: my 10-year-old niece, Carly. She e-mailed to say that my review "wasn't very nice." Actually, she called it a "pile of rubble," which, for my money, represents a more surprising and memorable use of language than anything in "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:56 AM  |

Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation’s educational decline, but it probably doesn’t matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.

...

And therein is the paradox. America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That paradox—more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and cheese—illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:33 AM  |

“Yes. And the rocket’s glare: the red gash through and across impenetrable immutable sky; and the bombs which not burst but flowered, unfolded silently releasing their very bombness and explodidity in the very firmament, air, which itself in its implacable and tangible reality gave not proof but irrefutable incontrovertible notproof through the long inevitable and implacable night that it was, still, in fact and theory an inexorable reality, there, as if experience and ratiocination and unbelief obviated the very sense and sentience and not-sentience and non-sense that its own obverse could even exist, be, and he: “—O, say! Does it then? Does it??” —and the other “—Does what?” and he: “Does that star-spangled for it must be spangled for its very spangledness obviates its own incomprehensible not-spangledness” and the other “—yes?” and he: “—banner, ribbon, avatar of its intractable bannerness, still, yet, indeed, wave—”

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:46 AM  |

Network head David Janollari says he would "gladly" do a TV movie featuring the Spike character if Marsters and "Buffy"/"Angel" creator Joss Whedon want to do one.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:07 AM  |

Egoism -- My cigarettes smell good. Other people's smell bad.

Where does the smoke go? Only the person producing it is unconcerned.

Some people throw trash in the street. Other people have to clean it up.

When I bumped into someone, I apologized. When my smoke hit your face, I said nothing.

Don't smoke in a crowd. Coats are expensive.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:05 AM  |

My high score? Well ... hell, son. Believe me, I wish I could tell you the answers to all of life's questions, I really do. To be on top of it all at one moment, riding high on the joys of success, the satisfaction of great accomplishment, whether it be portraying the president of the United States or narrating the harrowing story of Andy Dufresne or Clint Eastwood's subtly beautiful Million Dollar Baby. This is no small thing. And yet a man hungers still, falls still—far short of his dreams, of the hopes he stores for ages in the quiet longing of his beating heart. And what was the highest score of all? I wish I knew. I truly wish I knew.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:49 AM  |

Comics from Paulette Poullet, Kenneth Koch, Nate Powell, Jeremy Broomfield & Claude le Monde, and Patricia Storms

Fiction from Chris Bachelder, Alika Tanaka, Dave Housley, Julia Ridley Smith, and Kurtis Davidson

Nonfiction from Traci Burns

Poetry from Dan Albergotti, Linh Dinh, C. Derick Varn, Joanne Lowery, Michael Constantine McConnell, Lisa Jarnot, Adam Clay, Eric Amling, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Anna Fulford, Denise Duhamel & Maureen Seaton, Chad Davidson & John Poch, Nick Carbo, Michael Robins, Marc McKee, Jon Leon, Becky Cooper, Matthew Rohrer, Chris Vitiello, and James Grinwis

Art and Photography from John Norris, Jon Clark, Mitchell Ostrover, and Mike Stauss

Humor from Tom Greenwood

and introducing Index by The Editors

# posted by The Editors @ 8:11 PM  |

Did you go to concerts?
Sure. There once was a Bruce Springsteen concert outside in Saratoga Springs, and we were all waiting on the lawn, in the rain, and he came out three hours early with an acoustic guitar and sang “Who’ll Stop the Rain?” and the rain stopped. My favorite song of his is “Meeting Across the River”—a perfect, beautiful searing thing.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:31 AM  |

CP: So even though the downfall of American movies can be traced to the rise of corporations, the problem isn't principally one of corporate control?

Thomson: I don't think it is. If you look at television, you see that it has some advantages over film--in that television production is ridiculously fast compared with movies. And if you've got a hit show, you really do turn it over to the people responsible--the writers, the directors, the producers, the actors. And their ingenuity has a kind of freedom that I think once existed in B pictures. A producer in the '40s and '50s would've said to an Edgar Ulmer [Detour] or someone directing a B picture, "Well, look, if you can do it in 12 days for $120,000, go do it." And that operation wouldn't have gotten nearly as much scrutiny or interference as a big picture. The idea was that a B picture is a thing unto its own, a race against time that requires a terrific degree of expertise and inventiveness--so it's better to just let the guys do it.

CP: The most interesting "B movies" now go straight to video and TV, while Hollywood makes only "A pictures" with B content--or C content. It used to be that the summer blockbuster epitomized Hollywood and now that season has stretched to 12 months.

Thomson: The "A movies" are childish in content. A lot of the best writers these days are drawn to television rather than to the movies. Because if you write for the movies, you are, more than ever, in this dreadful committee structure where you get rewritten and rewritten and rewritten. Certainly there are corporate structures in television. But the volume of production is the distinguishing factor. Television has to produce a great deal just to fill the air, whereas the movies are always going for the smash hit. There was a time when the studios were very happy with a film if it made a modest profit. Now no one ever dreams of making a modest profit. They may end up making a loss, but what they're aiming at is a huge profit. It's a version of gambling, in other words.

CP: And it's not unique to Hollywood, either.

Thomson: It's there all through the culture.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:20 AM  |

When H. Michael Brewer watches Mr. Fantastic, The Thing, the Invisible Woman and the Human Torch battle Dr. Doom in "Fantastic Four," which opened July 8, he'll be seeing something much larger - a metaphor for the church.

...the comparisons Brewer can draw between the Man of Steel and the Son of Man are seemingly endless.

_Superman's father, who lived in the heavens, sends his son to Earth.

_He grows up in a small town but moves to the big city when he reaches manhood.

_He takes a commonplace job.

_He has amazing powers, but rather than using them to take control of Earth, he uses them for good.

_His mission is to save the world.

_He dies to save Metropolis but later returns to life.

"That's a pretty powerful role model," Brewer said of Superman.

Rev. Lovejoy: I remember another gentle visitor from the heavens. Who came to earth... and then died... only to be brought back to life again. And his name was E.T., the extra-terrestrial. I love that little guy.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:49 PM  |

The primary objectives of the BCBF are: 1) beautification of the city; 2) creation of employment for artists and 3) diversifying access to visual communication in public spaces to reflect the creativity and multiplicity that exists in Canada’s urban centres.

Them.ca proposes a charge of $6.00 per sq. foot of billboard space per year. Those funds will then be redirected towards public art. Thus, five 15’x25’ billboards could subsidize one small art piece for the cost of $10 000.00 (allowing $1250.00 for administrative and maintenance expenses incurred by city and granting bodies).

On a larger scale, the estimated 5000 billboards in Toronto could generate six million dollars for public art per year.

# posted by Anonymous @ 4:07 PM  |

Lump gallery/projects is very pleased to present Lost Weekend 2005.

July 22 – 24, 2005. Lost weekend 2005 will feature a reading/literary event
presented by Raleigh’s Optical Oak on Friday, July 22. A night of
sound/noise/performance featuring Boyzone, Phon, Planecrash and Vuokko on
Saturday, July 23rd and All For Show contemporary videos by young, British
video artists on Sunday, July 24th. The gallery will also feature new
posters by Team Lump artists. These three events will be a low cost and
highly entertaining. This event will run for one weekend only July 22 – 24,
2005. Don’t Miss It!!!

# posted by Anonymous @ 12:46 PM  |

The 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's "annus mirabilis" has not passed quietly. Newspapers, magazines and TV documentaries have all trumpeted the year in which Einstein published five papers fundamentally rethinking the laws of time and space. This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the former patent clerk's death.

Yet lying between these two dates is a less well-known anniversary. It is 74 years since Einstein attended the only seance of his life. What could have persuaded Einstein, harbinger of the scientific age, to attend such an unscientific event?

It would appear after decades of purported contact with the dead, those on the other side remain no more intelligent than when they were alive, perhaps less. Other than comfort, the knowledge possessed by the dead has produced nothing of substantial scientific value to the living. This has caused some skepticism.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 7:47 PM  |

"There's nothing you can know that isn't known." All You Need is Love (Magical Mystery Tour): John Lennon advocates metaphysical anti-realism and endorses the conclusion of Fitch's paradox.

"Without going out of my door I can know all things of earth." The Inner Light (Lady Madonna single): Harrison defends the synthetic a priori.

"Her name was Magil, and she called herself Lil, but everyone knew her as Nancy." Rocky Racoon, (The White Album): McCartney elaborates Frege's sense/reference distinction.

"Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes." Penny Lane, (Magical Mystery Tour ): McCartney endorses a rather extreme form of anti-realism.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 4:02 PM  |

Now, seven centuries later, Polo's credibility again is under attack. According to critics, he never even set foot in China. Had he been there, they argue, he would have reported important aspects of 13th-century Chinese life that went unmentioned. Among his omissions: tea drinking, calligraphy, the binding of women's feet to keep them small, and, most glaring, the Great Wall of China.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:02 AM  |

There once was a man whose wife was dead. She was dead when he fell in love with her, and she was dead for the twelve years they lived together, during which time she bore him three children, all of them dead as well, and at the time of which I am speaking, the time during which her husband began to suspect that she was having an affair, she was still dead.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:50 AM  |

...[upon being asked] "What method of yam propagation is least apt to offend my family's fields' jealous and tempermental Yam Gods?" the catastatic child apparently launches into an entire protodialectical inquiry into just why exactly the interlocutor believes in jealous and tempermental Yam Gods at all, and whether this villager hsa ever in quiet moments closed his eyes and sat very still and gazed deep inside himself to see whether in his very heart of hearts he truly believes in these ill-tempered Yam Gods or whether he's merely been as it were culturally conditioned from an early age to ape what he has seen his parents and all the other villagers say and do and appear to believe, and whether it has ever late at night or in the humid quiet of the rain forest's dawn occurred to the questioner that perhaps all these others didn't really, truly believe in petulant Yam Gods either but were themselves merely aping what they in turn saw everyone else behaving as if they believed, and so on, and whether it was possible -- just as a thought experiment if nothing else -- that everyone in the entire village had at some quiet point seen into their heart's hearts and realized that their putative belief in the Yam Gods was mere mimicry and so felt themselves to be secret hypocrite or fraud; and, if so, that what if just one villager of whatever caste or family suddenly stood up and admitted aloud that he was merely following empty custom and did not in his heart of hearts truly believe in any fearsome set of Yam Gods requiring propitiation to prevent drought or decimation by yamaphids: would that villager be stoned to death, or banished, or might his admission not just possibly be met with a huge collective sign of relief because now everyone else could be spared oppressive inner feelings of hypocrisy and self-contempt and admit their own inner disbelief as well; and if, theoretically, all this were to come about, what consequences might this sudden communal admission and relief have for the interlocutor's own ffeelings about the Yam Gods, for instance was it not theoretically possible that this villager might discover, in the absence of any normative cultural requirement to fear and distruct the Yam Gods, that his true religious conception was actually of Yam Gods who were rather kindly and benign and not Yam Gods he had to be fearful of offending or had to try to appease but rather Yam Gods to feel helped, succored, and even comme on dit loved by, and to try to love in return, and freely, this of course assuming that the two of them could come to some kind of agreement on what they meant by 'love' in a religious context, in other words agape and so on and so forth...

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:15 PM  |

I don't think a lot of Conan fans realize that there was a time before the cartoon, He-Man's Pre-Classic (or Mineternian) period, when the barbarian roots were the heart of the Masters story. It was a brief time, roughly 1981-83, when He-Man was depicted in Mattel's minicomics as a wandering barbarian, the strongest of his jungle-bred tribe and fiercely devoted to his mysterious warrior goddess.

No Prince Adam secret identity. No She-Ra. No Orko.

It's been sheer hell trying to bring Mineternia out of the shadow of the TV kiddie toons. Unfortunately, the superheroic and comedic potential of the toyline are what the cartoon played up, and that's what Mattel has allowed to define the franchise. In my opinion, this has kept MOTU from taking its place in the larger dark fantasy community (LOTR, Conan, Xena, Star Wars, etc.), where it can grow and stay artistically fresh.

There's a reason more people think of RAINBOW BRITE, than Conan, in the same breath with He-Man.

Mineternian fans, like Eldor, are slowly changing that. These websites have been struggling for a few years to keep He-Man's Conan connection alive, and I hope you'll check them out.

http://www.vaultsofgrayskull.co.uk - Three, complete novellas of Mineternian He-Man
http://mineternia.tripod.com - A collection of short story adaptations of the Masters' minicomics
http://www.geocities.com/hordakalpha/fan_fics_2.html - More skull-cracking barbarian He-Man stories
http://www.dukenostalgia.com/He-Man/Motu_boxart.html - The hauntingly beautiful box art that hooked us all from go!

To get to know Masters' all over again in its purest form, drop by http://www.he-mantales.com for a reintro.

# posted by Anonymous @ 1:49 PM  |

The outrageously muscle-bound action figure and his allies and villans created a fantasy world for boys that, at the height of MOTU's popularity in 1986 reached $400 million in U.S. sales, only to plummet to $7 million domestically the following year. During its six-year run, the line sold $1.2 billion worldwide and spawned a syndicated cartoon series and a major motion picture——a feat not even the venerable Barbie can claim.

The authors also recount the creative process, from He-Man's origins as three characters——a barbarian, a military man, and a futuristic space man——to the moment when Mattel's president, in choosing among several toy concepts, pointed to the He-Man prototypes and said, "Those have the power."

# posted by Anonymous @ 1:29 PM  |

"It [Attack Vector: Tactical] is certainly the best boardgame simulation of actual space combat physics I know of. Beyond the physics model, it includes some clever 3-D display components, and a lot of creatively buried math. The end result keeps the mental overhead down to a minimum, letting you focus on the tactical situation. If you're interested in space combat, this is highly recommended."

# posted by Anonymous @ 12:41 PM  |

The only possible presidential speech fantasy in my wildest of daydreams, my oratorical castle in the air, is that one day, for just one measly speech, the president - the man of "mission accomplished," the man who was once asked at a press conference to discuss one of his mistakes and couldn't think of any, the man who is surely the sunniest looker-on-the-bright-side east of Drew Barrymore - would sit behind his Oval Office desk, stare into a TV camera and say: "My fellow Americans, good evening. As if that's possible."

# posted by Anonymous @ 12:17 PM  |

Comics from Paulette Poullet, Kenneth Koch, Nate Powell, Jeremy Broomfield & Claude le Monde, and Patricia Storms

Fiction from Chris Bachelder, Alika Tanaka, Dave Housley, Julia Ridley Smith, and Kurtis Davidson

Nonfiction from Traci Burns

Poetry from Dan Albergotti, Linh Dinh, C. Derick Varn, Joanne Lowery, Michael Constantine McConnell, Lisa Jarnot, Adam Clay, Eric Amling, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Anna Fulford, Denise Duhamel & Maureen Seaton, Chad Davidson & John Poch, Nick Carbo, Michael Robins, Marc McKee, Jon Leon, Becky Cooper, Matthew Rohrer, Chris Vitiello, and James Grinwis

Art and Photography from John Norris, Jon Clark, Mitchell Ostrover, and Mike Stauss

Humor from Tom Greenwood

and introducing Index by The Editors

# posted by The Editors @ 12:01 AM  |